Editorial
C O M M 0 It W E A Un-intelligence e were almost all wrong," David Kay, the former U.S. chief weapons inspector in Iraq, told the Senate Armed Services Committee. After months of searching, Kay...
...Kay's testimony shows that the very premises of Bush's war on terrorism are wrong...
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...Yet Kay's confidence in Bush's lack of culpability may be as unfounded as the inspector's prewar certainty about Iraq's WMD...
...Yet, as polls showed before the war, the American people did not want to go to war precipitously or without firm international support...
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...After months of searching, Kay has concluded that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction (WMD...
...He thinks it is the intelligence services that owe Bush one...
...It has been explicit: "VOTF does not seek any change in church doctrine" (www.votf.org...
...David Kay insists that the failure to find WMD is much more than a "political gotcha" question...
...Moreover, waging war everywhere is not a possibility, and even if it were, it would be no solution...
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...They were right...
...It is scandalous that Bush thinks a rhetorical switch from justiSTAFF Editor: Paul Baumann Managing Editor: Patrick Jordan Associate Editors: Daria Donnelly (At Large) Grant Gallicho Maurice Timothy Reidy Production Editor & Webmaster: Tiina Aleman Copy Editor: Susanne Washburn Business Manager: Paul Q. Kane Poetry: Rosemary Deen, Daria Donnelly Screen: Rand Richards Cooper, Richard Alleva Stage/Media: Celia Wren Columnists: E. J. Dionne Jr., John Garvey, Carlos Lozada, Andrew Lustig, Jo McGowan, William Pfaff Circulation Manager: Malena Seldin Administrative Assistant: Quanda Williams Advertising Manager: Roth Advertising Commonweal, [ISSN 0010-33301 A Review of Public Affairs, Religion, Literature, and the Arts, is published biweekly except Christmas/New Year's...
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...In refusing to cooperate fully with UN inspectors, the dictator apparently was carrying on a game of bluff and bluster, hoping to intimidate both internal opponents and external foes by pretending that he still possessed such weapons...
...www.commonwealmagazine.org Commonweal 5 February 13, 2004 Coming in COMMONWEAL February 27 John Coleman:' What Mel Gibson could learn from Marc Chagall about the Passion of Christ March 12 1 Andrew Greeley: How to restructure the Catholic Church fying the war because of Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction" to now justifying the war because of Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities" will satisfy the American people...
...The intelligence fiasco in Iraq demonstrates why such a policy is inherently unstable, even incoherent...
...He's right...
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...intelligence failures...
...military and other resources in an endless and hopeless search for absolute security...
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...Although the three priests affirm a few of VOTF's stated objectives (supporting the abused, for example), they warn that "the people of ancient Troy learned a valuable lesson once and pastors would be derelict in their duty to do otherwise...
...At least at this point, Kay's contention that all the blame rests with the CIA is dubious...
...In a letter to the Fall River priests, O'Brien said that the accusation that VOTF associates with dissenters is a canard...
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...There is no evidence that VOTF, after having lured the faithful to their meetings with a moderate-sounding agenda, has been stumping for married or female priests...
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...Kay has rejected the idea that President Bush owes the country an explanation for these astounding errors...
...President Bush made that choice, and he placed American prestige and credibility on the line in doing so...
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...Former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has said that over-throwing Saddam was an administration priority well before 9/11...
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...He appears to have thought that a massive show of force, whether justified or not, would intimidate potential adversaries while winning for him the abiding gratitude of the American people...
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...It should be remembered that after initial hesitancy, Thomas V. Daily, bishop emeritus of Brooklyn, granted VOTF the right to meet in his diocese...
...Let's hope the commission's investigation will help make that fact even clearer...
...Because after examination he found VOTF a credible group that was established not to foment dissent but to find a way for laypeople to assist meaningfully in the prevention of clerical sexual abuse (see "VOTF Un-banned," May 23, 2003...
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...Cheney is also reported to be playing a large role in the creation of the investigative commission...
...Preemption sounds straightforward enough, but it carries with it far more risks than benefits, as the situation in Iraq shows...
...In the run-up to the war, both Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld established their own intelligence vetting operations to circumvent resistance at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the State Department...
...How broad the commission's mandate will be and whether it will report in a timely fashion remain to be seen...
...That's a sound idea, one President George W. Bush had resisted, but now is heeding...
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...Instead, he assured the nation that we could vanquish all our enemies on our own...
...There have been numerous reliable reports about the administration's meddling in the evaluation of intelligence as well as determination to go to war...
...As "amateurs at our brutal church politics, surely they [VO'1'F] can be forgiven a few mistakes," O'Brien wrote...
...In "A Pastoral Letter from Your Priests," the authors express "grave misgivings" about Voice of the Faithful (VOTF...
...After some initial contact, VOTF went out of its way to distance itself from supposed dissenters, either on the left or the right, O'Brien declared...
...These misgivings boil down to the usual criticisms made of VOTF by its detractors: that VOTF associates with those who dissent from church teaching and that it is unwilling, in the words of the Fall River priests, to "take a position on issues such as the ordination of women, sexual morality, abortion, and the divine foundation of the papacy...
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...prewar intelligence a massive failure, and urged Congress to conduct an independent investigation to determine exactly how intelligence services could have gotten things so wrong...
...A damning report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (see "The Truth & Iraq," January 30, 2004) documented many instances in which the administration exaggerated or misrepresented intelligence about the nature of the threat posed by Iraq...
...The Zenit news agency (November 19, 2003) reprinted a letter to Catholics of the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, written by three of the diocese's priests, Thomas A. Frechette, Paul T. Lamb, and Roger J. Landry...
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...Kay rightly called U.S...
...In laying out the reasoning behind the war on terrorism, the president asserted that the risk posed by WMD in the hands of terrorists was so great that it necessitated unilateral U.S...
...Historian David O'Brien, author of Public Catholicism, felt compelled to respond to this tired caricature of VOTF as a subversive group...
...As a recent report from the Army War College put it, "The global war on terrorism as presently defined and conducted is strategically unfocused, promises much more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate U.S...
...We now live in a world of potential danger and great insecurity, but it remains a world where terrorist threats are best defeated by increased international cooperation rather than unilateral action...
...Democrats are eager to learn if the Bush administration exaggerated the Iraqi threat, while the president will be keen to broaden the focus of the investigation beyond Iraq to other situations in which U.S...
...military action whenever and wherever the U.S...
...Saddam was unable to reconstitute his WMD pro-grams...
...VOTF's response to sexual abuse in the church is the sort of project all Catholics can endorse, even those who initially mistake such acts of concern and responsibility for a Trojan horse...
...Bush has said he will issue an executive order creating an independent bipartisan commission to investigate U.S...
...What Kay discovered—or didn't discover—makes clear that the much maligned UN inspection system and sanction policy of the 1990s worked...
...The terrorist threat is not tied to a nation-state or a particular region, and in most circumstances it cannot be countered simply by waging war...
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...Bush refused to level with the American people about this uncomfortable truth...
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...intelligence has proved unreliable...
...The reason the president gave for going to war has proven fallacious...
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...He owes the nation an ex-planation for his actions...
...Will those operations be scrutinized by the commission...
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...The invasion and occupation of Iraq was not a war of necessity, but of choice...
...For one thing, Vice President Dick Cheney continues to peddle unfounded assertions about Saddam 's nonexistent weapons...
Vol. 131 • February 2004 • No. 3
